#judge-reed-oconnor

#judge-reed-oconnor

Hill is one of nine people currently standing trial for events stemming from a small protest that took place on July 4, 2025, at the Prairieland Detention Center just outside of Dallas, in which a police officer was non-fatally shot. According to participants, the protest was meant to be a noisy but peaceful show of solidarity with ICE detainees held in the prison.

He's the only guy I know, he'll get 100 percent of the Democrat vote, 100 percent of the Republican vote. They want to get him out of there. He is such a pain in the a**, but he's so good and so talented.

Trump wins 69% of cases before Trump-appointed district judges. Now compare that to: 21% win rate before non-Trump Republican appointees and 38.6% win rate before Democratic appointees. Earlier Republican-appointed judges rule against Trump at a rate approaching four out of five cases. That means Trump's 69% success rate before his own appointees isn't some partisan alignment, but rather a notable statistical anomaly.

But inside the courtroom, the argument barely touched speech or religion. Instead, the justices together gravitated toward something else entirely: a problem about time, causation, and whether constitutional authority can be temporally partitioned. Does the Constitution operate only forward? Can a law be unconstitutional tomorrow yet legally untouchable yesterday? And can a single conviction permanently close the courthouse doors to the people most harmed by an unconstitutional rule?

On Friday, two far-right judges greenlit the Trump administration's radical reinterpretation of federal law that would sweep millions more immigrants into mandatory detention, potentially expanding the mass deportation machinery in new and horrifying ways. Their 2-1 decision for the 5 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would transform the entire United States into a permanent border zone where unauthorized immigrants can be jailed indefinitely without bond, even years after they arrived.

Much of the ruling rests on the words of West Texas A&M President Walter Wendler, which Kacsmaryk adopted throughout his 46-page opinion. In a March 2023 email to the campus community, Wendler wrote that drag "does not preserve a single thread of human dignity," describing it as a performance that "exaggerat[es] aspects of womanhood (sexuality, femininity, gender)" and "stereotype[s] women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others."

And a ruling is very likely to break on predictable, ideological lines, 6-3, unless the case is handed back to a lower court. The Supreme Court gave a win to trans rights back in 2020, with the help of new conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, in the case which correlated employment discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity with discrimiation "on the basis of sex," which is a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.